October 2020
Chemung County, New York - It’s one of the simplest ways to track down people who may have COVID-19, but not everyone is willing to participate.
Across Chemung County and Steuben County, officials rely on contact tracing to identify close contacts of people who test positive for COVID-19. Tracking these people down helps prevent community spread by alerting these close contacts about possible exposure.
A 10-minute phone call and answering a couple of questions could save a life, or many lives in the Southern Tier, and across the region.
I spoke with Chemung County Health Department communications manager Vincent Azzarelli who says locally, people are participating in the process and it’s helping.
He says the bump in cases we saw in late September was due to a few large-scale events, but now the cases are mostly being linked to community spread.
I also caught up with Steuben County Health public education coordinator Lorelei Wagner who echoed that reaction, saying people in the county are willing to help out. She says the county utilizes a local phone number when contacting people and they’ve also partnered with the Sheriff’s Office to do welfare checks on those who don’t answer the phone after a certain period of time.
When a positive case is identified, a contact tracer reaches out to anyone identified as a close contact to the person who tests positive. Those who get a call from a contact tracer are told to do one of two things. If they aren’t experiencing symptoms, they’re advised to quarantine and if they are symptomatic, they need to be tested.
If one positive is linked to three people and only two of them participate, the third person could be contributing to community spread, which happens fast.
Steuben County health officials include some contact tracing information in their daily COVID-19 updates, including where people have worked or visited before testing positive. That information also helps link today’s cases to previous ones to see if any new clusters are popping up.
Two positive cases this week in Steuben County were discovered through contact tracing of two other recent positive cases.
Even if this process seems to be helping along the Southern Tier, that’s not the case in other areas of New York. Some people have been hesitant to participate because of privacy concerns. The biggest question has been whether agencies like police and ice will have access to the information you provide to a contact tracer.
New York lawmakers passed the Contact Tracing Confidentiality Act in July with a unanimous vote. The act guarantees your information remains confidential, no matter what. But, Governor Cuomo still hasn’t signed it, and until that happens, many people say they won’t be sharing any information.
Last month, the state of New York launched a COVID-19 tracing app called Covid Alert NY, which helps you track cases in any county, and it’s free to download.
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